From Bloomberg: Google Inc. (won a bid to delay a copyright lawsuit by the Authors Guild of America over the company’s plans to digitally scan millions of books while it appeals a decision that allows the plaintiffs to sue as a class. U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Lohier of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Manhattan […]

The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will allow Google to appeal the class action status of the seven-year old Google Inc. v. Authors Guild case, the court announced in an order this morning. Decertifying the case would force Author’s Guild members who dispute the digitization of their works to sue Google individually. Google has argued that many authors have benefited economically from its Google Books project, and whether a scan violated copyright or was protected under fair use doctrine should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

Arguing that authors have suffered no economic harm from the scanning of more than 15 million books, Google on Friday filed a motion seeking the dismissal of the long-running Authors Guild v. Google case. The motion states that the digitized books, and the Google Books service that they enable, are “not a substitute for the [physical] books themselves—readers still must buy a book from a store or borrow it from a library to read it. Rather, Google Books is an important advance on the card-catalogue method of finding books,” that allows full-text searching.

University of California, Berkeley, law professor Pamela Samuelson, on behalf of more than 80 academics, sent a letter on Monday to Judge Denny Chin asserting that academic authors should not be included as part of a class authorization in the high profile Google Books case, due to fundamental disagreements between the interests of academics and other types of authors.

Google yesterday filed a motion to dismiss the Authors Guild as a plaintiff in the long-running Google Books case, arguing that the organization lacks “associational standing” to sue on behalf of individual copyright holders.